Here is the third in a series of blogs that I started on May 18. The first was called “Why YOU may LIKE Government ‘Theft’”. In it, I listed four possible justifications for government to act like Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor. The point is to think about whether the top personal marginal tax rate really should be higher or lower than currently, as currently debated these days in the newspapers.

However, perhaps we should also remember what is wrong with government using high marginal tax rates to take from the rich in order to help the poor. The problem is that a higher personal marginal tax rate distorts individual behavior, particularly labor supply and savings behavior, by discouraging work effort and investment. Since those are good for the economy, high marginal tax rates are bad for the economy! In fact, economic theory suggests that the “deadweight loss” from taxation may increase roughly with the square of the tax rate. In other words, doubling a tax rate (e.g. from 20% to 40%) would quadruple the excess burden of taxes – the extent to which the burden on taxpayers exceeds the revenue collected.

The point is just that we face tradeoffs. Yes, we have four possible reasons that we as a society may want higher tax rates on the rich in order to provide a social safety net, but we also have significant costs of doing so. Probably somewhere in the middle might help trade off those costs against the benefits, but it’s really a matter of personal choice when you vote: how much do you value a safety net for those less fortunate that yourself? And how much do you value a more efficient tax system and economy?

In the first blog on May 18, I listed all four justifications, any one of which may or may not ring true to you. If one or more justification is unconvincing, then perhaps a different justification is more appealing. In that blog, I put off the last three justifications and mostly just discussed the first one, namely, the arguments of “moral philosophy” for extra help to the poor. As a matter of ethics, you might think it morally just or fair to help the poor starving masses. That blog describes a range of philosophies, all the way from “no help to poor” (Nozick) in a spectrum that ends with “all emphasis on the poor” (Rawls).

In the second blog on July 13, I discussed the second justification. Aside from that moral theorizing, suppose the poor are not deemed special at all: every individual receives the exact same weight, so we want to maximize the un-weighted sum of all individuals’ “utility”, as suggested by Jeremy Bentham, the “founding figure of modern utilitarianism.” His philosophy is “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Also suppose utility is not proportional to income, but is instead a curved function, with “declining marginal utility”. If so, then a dollar from a rich person is relatively unimportant to that rich person, while a dollar to a poor person is very important to that poor person. In that case, equal weights on everybody would still mean that total welfare could increase by taking from the rich to help the poor.

The point of THIS blog is a third justification, quite different in the sense that it does NOT require making anybody worse off (the rich) in order to make someone else better off (the poor). It is a case where we might all have nearly the same income and same preferences, and yet we might all be better off with a tax system that has higher marginal tax rates on those with more income, and transfers to those with little or no income. How? Suppose we’re all roughly equally well off in the long run, or in terms of expectations, but that we all face a random element in our annual income. Some fraction of us will have a small business that experiences a bad year once in a while, or become unemployed once in a while, or have a bad health event that requires us to stop work once in a while. To protect ourselves against those kinds of bad outcomes, we might like to buy insurance, but private insurance companies might not be able to offer such insurance because of two important market failures:

Because of “adverse selection”, the insurance company might get only the bad risks to sign up, those who are inherently more likely to become unemployed or to have a bad year.

Because of “moral hazard”, insurance buyers might change their behavior and become unemployed on purpose, or work less and earn less.

With those kinds of market failure, the private market might fail altogether, and nobody is able to buy such insurance. Yet, having such insurance can make us all better off, by protecting us from actual risk!

Potentially, if done properly, the government can help fix this market failure. Unemployment insurance is one such attempt. But the point here is just that a progressive income tax can also act implicitly and partially as just that kind of insurance:

In each “good” year, you are made to pay a “premium” in the form of higher marginal tax rates and tax burden. Then, anytime you have a “bad” year such as losing your job or facing a difficult market for the product you sell, you get to receive from this implicit insurance plan by facing lower tax rates or even getting payments from the government (unemployment compensation, income tax credits, or even welfare payments).

I don’t mean that the entire U.S. tax system works that way; I only mean that it has some element of that kind of plan, and it might help make some people happier knowing they will be helped when times are tough. But you can decide the importance of that argument for yourself.

Next week, the final of my four possible justifications for progressive taxation.

Recent debate at the state and national level has focused on whether to enact a climate policy to control greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide. The fact is, however, that we already have policies that affect such emissions, whether we like it or not. Such policies can be coordinated and rational, or they can be piecemeal, inconsistent, and counter-productive. Almost any policy designed to improve energy security, for example, would likely affect oil prices and energy efficiency, just as any policy to encourage alternative fuels would also affect energy security, electricity prices, consumer welfare, and health! Here is a guide for thinking about how some of these policies work, and which combinations might work better than others.

The most obvious existing policy that affects carbon dioxide emissions is the gasoline tax that applies both at state and federal levels. If that tax encourages less driving and more fuel-efficient cars, then it also impacts urban smog and global warming as well as protecting us from the whims of oil-rich nations with unstable governments. In fact, with respect to the price at the pump, a tax on emissions would look a lot like a tax on gasoline, and vice versa. Averaged over all state and federal taxes, the U.S. gasoline tax is about $0.39 per gallon, far less than around the rest of the world. Most countries in the OECD have a tax over $2/gallon.

For the most part, the U.S. has chosen to avoid tax approaches to energy and environmental policy and instead uses various mandates, standards, and subsidies. Cars sold in the U.S. are required to meet emission-per-mile standards for most local and regional pollutants like fine particles, sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrous oxides (NOX), and volatile organic compounds (VOC) that contribute to ozone smog. Those rules make cars more expensive but have successfully cleaned the air in major cities and around the country. They also have the side effect of reducing greenhouse gases. Another mandate is the “Corporate Average Fuel Economy” (CAFE) standards that require each auto manufacturing company to meet a minimum for the average miles-per-gallon of their fleet of cars sold each year. For each big gas-guzzler they sell, the company needs to sell more small fuel-efficient cars to bring the average back down. To meet this standard, every car company must raise the price of their gas guzzlers (to sell fewer of them) and reduce the price of their small fuel-efficient cars (to sell more of them). The effect is the same as having a tax on big cars and subsidy on small cars.

These energy and environmental policies are also intricately related to other tax policies, as well as government spending! For any chosen size of government and overall tax bite, any dollar not collected in gasoline tax is another dollar that must instead be collected from payroll taxes, income taxes, corporate profits tax, or state and local sales tax. When looked at through that lens, gasoline taxes may not be that bad – or at least not as bad as some of those other taxes we must pay instead.

Every state and local government is also worried about the pricing of electricity by huge electric companies that might naturally have monopoly power over their customers. Production efficiency requires a large plant, so a small remote town might be served only by one power company (with no competition from neighbors far away, since too much power is lost during transmission). So the public utility wants to regulate electricity prices, perhaps with block pricing that helps ensure adequate provision to low-income families. Yet the pricing of electricity inevitably affects electricity use, which affects coal use, urban smog, and greenhouse gas emissions. These policies are intricately related.

And these policies are related to government spending, since they affect car and gasoline purchases and therefore required spending on roads and highways as well as train tracks and mass transit in cities. These environmental and energy policies affect human health, and therefore health spending by government – as necessary to pay for additional illness caused by emissions from cars, power plants, and heat from burning fossil fuel.

We have no way to avoid these inter-connections. You are a consumer who wants lower gas taxes and electricity prices, but you also own part of the power company and auto manufacturers through your mutual fund or pension plan. You pay other taxes on income and purchases, and you breathe the air, so you are affected by emissions and need health care. We might as well think holistically and act for the good of everybody, because we are everybody!

Way back on May 18, I wrote a blog called “Why YOU may LIKE Government ‘Theft’”. In it, I listed four possible justifications for government to act like Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor. This combination of economics and philosophy is meant to help each of us think about what really should be the top personal marginal tax rate: should it be higher or lower than currently? This topic is hotly debated these days in the newspapers!

In that blog, I listed all four justifications, any one of which may or may not ring true to you. If one or more justification is unconvincing, then perhaps a different justification is more appealing. I put off the last three justifications to later blogs and mostly just discussed the first one, namely, that some “ethicists” in the field of “moral philosophy” have found ethical justifications for extra help to the poor. The moral justification may be the most common or usual one; you might think it morally just or fair to help the poor starving masses. That blog describes a range of philosophies, all the way from “no help to poor” (Nozick) in a spectrum that ends with “all emphasis on the poor” (Rawls).

But that’s not the only reason to have some degree of progressivity in our income tax system (taking higher percentages of income from those with more income). The second justification basically says okay, let’s skip the moral theorizing. Instead, suppose the poor are not deemed special at all. Suppose that ALL individuals receive the exact same weight. Suppose the objective is to maximize the un-weighted sum of all individuals’ wellbeing (or what we call “utility”). Actually, this is perhaps the view of Jeremy Bentham, who came to be considered the “founding figure of modern utilitarianism.” His philosophy is “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. That is, just add up all individual utilities, without weights, and maximize that sum.

So far, that might sound like no justification for taking from the rich to give to the poor. However, we did not say just add up their incomes, or to maximize total GNP. Instead, one might also believe that utility is not proportional to income, but is instead a curved function, as in the diagram below. In other words, “declining marginal utility”. If so, then a dollar from a rich person is relatively unimportant to that rich person, while a dollar to a poor person is very important to that poor person. In that case, equal weights on everybody would still mean that total welfare could increase by taking from the rich in order to help the poor.

The only remaining question is the degree of curvature, or the rate at which marginal utility declines. If it is a nearly straight line, then we might not want much redistribution. But if it has a lot of curvature, then the sum of utilities could be maximized by taking more from the rich than we do currently.

Despite being in a Department of Finance, my own background and research is in economics and public policy (hence the “Center for Business and Public Policy” in our department). I don’t claim expertise in finance, per se. On the other hand, it seems that both sides of the JP Morgan debate are using discussion of the Volcker Rule and their other financial expertise to obscure the basic logic of government bank regulation. It is a basic logic of incentives, which does not require expertise in finance!

JP Morgan wants to make money; we can hardly blame them for that. In economics generally, we let companies try to make money, as they have the expertise in their own line of business to determine the risk-reward tradeoff. If they lose money, then they lose money. They might even be able to buy various kinds of insurance – that’s between the company and their insurer. A person or company with insurance might have incentive to undertake riskier activities, since any gains are retained, while losses go to the insurer. But the insurance company might enter the deal willingly, to charge premiums, especially if it can require the company or person to limit some of their riskier activities. Your auto insurance has co-insurance and deductibles, to make you pay at least part of a loss and to restore some of your incentive for precaution.

But when a bank becomes “too big to fail”, the U.S. government is thrown into the role of insurer, without being able to collect premiums, co-insurance, or deductibles. It is not a “deal” between the bank and their insurer, because the government has no choice. Because of financial contagion, a single major bank failure could bring down the whole system and cause horrific recession.

Given that the bank’s biggest losses must be covered by their insurer (the U.S. government), the bank has more incentive to undertake even riskier activities: they get any profits, and they don’t suffer the worst losses. Any private insurer would require the bank to limit their riskiest activities, in order to be willing to sell that insurance. But the government is the insurer by default, with no private “deal” allowing the government to require limits on the riskiest activities in order to be willing to offer that insurance.

To be sure, the bank still must be careful about some risks, as many different kinds of losses would reduce their profits without requiring government bailout. The recent JP Morgan case did not create danger of bankruptcy or bailout, because their $2 billion loss on that one operation only offset part of their positive profits! But any bank that is “too big to fail” has less incentive to avoid the really big losses that could cause bankruptcy, because that would require the government to bail them out.

The government could pass laws and regulations to limit the banks’ riskiest activities, and that is the purpose of the much discussed Volcker Rule. I will leave the discussion of the details to the experts in finance. For example, the Volcker Rule may or may not be the best way to regulate banks. The effects depend a lot on the rule’s design, implementation, and enforcement! Maybe some other rule or incentive-management would be better. I will leave those details to the experts. Instead, the point here is just the simple logic that the government is not a private insurer who would require limitations on risky activity to be willing to sell insurance. The government must provide insurance, so they must have some kind of regulation to limit banks’ risky activities: higher capitalization requirement, Volcker rule, or other regulations.

I did in fact talk to some of the finance department’s experts, like Jeff Brown and George Pennacchi. George notes that “the incentive to take big risks declines as a bank finances itself with more shareholders’ equity (capital), and in JPMorgan’s defense they are one of the most highly capitalized banks, which helped them survive the crisis.” He adds that “If banks carry government deposit insurance, whether explicit or implicit due to Too-Big-to-Fail, then the government should limit their activities to protect taxpayers from losses.” Moreover, “it is noteworthy that, prior to the establishment of deposit insurance in 1933, banks had much greater capital (financing via shareholders’ equity) and made much less risky loans. … Indeed, there are several recent “narrow bank” proposals to greatly limit the activities of banks that issue insured deposits.” He has a review of the topic on his website (forthcoming in the Annual Review of Financial Economics).

The bottom line is that in a private deal between a bank and its insurance company, the bank would have to agree to limit risky activity in exchange for being able to buy this insurance. With government as insurer, they get the insurance regardless. So just look at their incentives! The banks have incentive to make money, and so they have incentive to take more risks since they can keep any profits and not cover the biggest losses. AND they have incentive to lobby Congress to avoid government regulations. We switch from a private market “deal” to the world of politics! If they can get Congress to limit regulation of banks, they can make riskier investments, make more money, and not have to cover the biggest losses.

So just think about those incentives, next time you hear a bank executive use the jargon of financial expertise to make the case against “unfair interference by government regulators into the private market”.

Or, alternatively, “Why I Love Teaching”! First, teaching lets me grandstand a bit, if that help students really think about the world around us. Second, it lets me pretend to be an expert in fields other than economics, even fields such as philosophy (see below). Third, trying to teach about a topic forces me to think hard about that topic myself! A case in point is the standard lecture on “Justifications for Government Policy to Redistribute Income”, otherwise known as “Robin Hood”, otherwise known as government “theft” from the rich to give to the poor.

One thing currently happening in the world around us is a heightened political debate about whether the top income tax rate is too low or too high. See the diagram below. So this “lecture topic” is not just textbook irrelevance. It might even help YOU to think about what you read in the newspaper! Then please decide for yourself.

I see four possible justifications, any one of which may or may not ring true to you. If one or more justification is unconvincing, however, then perhaps a different justification is more appealing.

1.) As described below, some in the field of “moral philosophy” have found ethical justifications for extra help to the poor.

2.) Even if the poor are not deemed special in that way, and all individuals receive equal weight, it may still be that a dollar from a rich person is relatively unimportant to that rich person, while a dollar to a poor person is very important to that poor person (higher marginal utility). If so, then equal weights on everybody would still mean that total welfare could increase by taking from the rich in order to help the poor.

3.) If incomes are generally uncertain, so that any individual might do well in some years and not in other years, then government might actually make all of us happier by the provision of implicit “insurance” – taking premiums in good times in order to help any person who suffers bad times.

4.) A reduction in income equality could be a “public good”, like the classic example of a lighthouse that benefits all ships whether they have helped to pay for it or not. Everybody’s individual incentive is therefore not to pay (to “free ride”). The private market never exists. But government can raise welfare for all shippers by taxing all ships and using the funds to build and operate the lighthouse. Similarly, if many people would LIKE to have more income equality in society, they could “free ride” on others who do give voluntarily to help the underprivileged. If so, then government could fix that market failure by taxing everybody and using the funds to improve income equality.

Having used up several paragraphs already, I will miss the chance to explain all four of these important points adequately in this one blog, and so I’ll save a few for the next blog. Let’s just start with the first one.

In the field of moral philosophy, some libertarians such as Robert Nozick believe that theft itself is ethically wrong, that each person is morally entitled to the fruits of their own labor. No person is allowed to steal from a rich neighbor, even to give to the poor, so why would government be allowed to do so? If theft is morally wrong in itself, then government should not be redistributing from rich to poor, no matter how needy the poor nor how worthy the cause. On the other hand, by the way, government steals from individuals through taxes in order to build highways and provide for national defense, and so one may wonder why theft is justified for some purposes and not others. One way out of that problem is to decide that a tax for public purposes is not in fact “theft”.

In contrast, John Rawls argues that the moral choice is to help the poor. Actually he has two important ideas. One is that those who are already rich have no moral justification to argue for reducing taxes on the rich, just as those who are poor have no moral justification to argue for raising taxes on the rich. Such positions are merely self-interested. Therefore, a useful thought experiment is to put yourself in what Rawls calls the “Original Position”, at the beginning of the World, before places have been assigned in the wide distribution of incomes and well-being. That is, suppose resources are limited, and that the world will inevitably have a distribution of different human abilities and disabilities. You don’t yet know your IQ, or whether you will have any particular talents in music, sports, the arts, or management. Our job in this “original position” is to write a constitution, a set of rules for government and human interaction.

The purpose of this thought experiment is to try to strip away self-interest and think about how rules “ought” to be designed. And then, Rawls’ second idea is about what any of us would likely decide to do in such a position. He argues that the only natural choice, indeed the only logical choice, is to be extremely risk averse. We are not talking about twenty bucks you might lose at the Casino, where risk is fun. Instead, we are talking about your entire life’s prospects, where risk is not fun. It must be great to be Brad Pitt, but what if you end up with little talent or ability. You could end up homeless, or worse. Given that risk, he argues, one should design the rules such that society would take good care of those who are disadvantaged, unlucky, or disabled. You might well be the person on the bottom of the totem pole.

His treatise, called “A Theory of Justice” is 600 pages, so I haven’t even read it all! So I won’t try to explain all the reasoning, but the interesting point is the connection between risk aversion and redistribution. Rawls himself is extremely risk averse, saying we ought to maximize the welfare of the poorest person with the minimum income – the “maximin” strategy. That does not mean perfect equality, as he points out that the poorest person’s welfare might be improved by giving the most talented individuals plenty of incentive to work hard and invent new technology that generates plenty of profits, market success, and economic growth. But cutting the tax rate on the rich is only justified for Rawls if that really does improve the welfare of the poorest.

Well, out of space for today, so I’ll save the other justifications for next time. But in case you don’t like the justifications of Rawls, those other justifications (#2 through #4) are completely different!

My own research area is environmental and natural resource economics, which others often call “sustainability”. That’s actually embarrassing, because I don’t know what it means. For a renewable resource like timber, it seems pretty easy: you just plant trees, let them grow, cut them down, and then plant trees again. For a nonrenewable resource like oil, it’s impossible: once a barrel of oil is consumed, it’s gone forever. The only way to make oil “sustainable” is not to use it, which does not make any sense, because oil has no value at all if it can’t be used.

So, sustainability is either obvious or impossible. The concept seems to be of no use whatever. So I turn to people smarter than me, to get some answers. By “smarter than me”, in this case, I mean (1.) Nobel-Prize winning economist Robert Solow, and (2.) whoever writes for Wikipedia.

Way back in 1991, Robert Solow wrote “Sustainability: An Economist’s Perspective”, in which he says: “It is very hard to be against sustainability. In fact, the less you know about it, the better it sounds.” He says he has seen various definitions, but they all turn out to be vague. So his essay is an attempt to make it more precise. “Pretty clearly the notion of sustainability is about … a moral obligation that we are supposed to have for future generations.” But you can’t be morally obligated to do something that is not feasible! He notes UNESCO’s definition: “… every generation should leave water, air, and soil resources as pure and unpolluted as when it came on earth.” But taken literally, that injunction “would mean to make no use of mineral resources; it would mean to do no permanent construction, … build no roads, build no dams, build no piers.” That is neither feasible nor desirable!

Instead, he suggests that sustainability might be both feasible and desirable if it is defined as “an obligation to conduct ourselves so that we leave to the future the option or the capacity to be as well off as we are.” In the final analysis, what that means is that we don’t necessarily have to leave all the oil in the ground, if we leave something else of equal or greater value, some other investment that can be used by future generations to produce and consume as we do, and which they can leave to other generations after them. It is a holistic concept, both simple and operational. We only need to add the value of all assets, subtract all liabilities, and make sure that the net wealth we bequeath is not less than we inherited.

We can use oil, but we should not simultaneously be running huge government budget deficits that reduce the net wealth left to our children and their children. The measure of “net wealth” should include the value of ecosystems, fresh water supplies, biodiversity, and oil, as well as productive farmland, infrastructure, machinery, and other productive assets. All those values are extremely difficult to measure, but at least the concept is clear.

Has that message been adopted since 1991? It certainly does not seem to be part of the thinking of the U.S. Congress and the rest of our political system. What are they using for guidance?

Wikipedia says “Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of responsibility, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use.” Okay, well, that’s still pretty vague, by Solow’s standards. Let’s see if they make it more specific: “In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other organisms. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems.”

I’m sorry, that kind of specificity does not make it more operational. They haven’t read Solow. In fact, the whole entry seems to read like it is intended to maximize the number of times it can link to other Wikipedia entries!

Actually, the only phrase in the whole entry that really struck me was “more sustainably.” Now, I REALLY do not know that THAT means. Our current trajectory is either sustainable, or it’s not! If future generations can live forever, how can they live longer than that? And if not, well, …

What is that, a gastrointestinal disorder? No, it’s the title of one of my recent research papers (joint with Dan Karney and Kathy Baylis) about unilateral efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). When worldwide agreement is not possible, then the question is whether GHG abatement policy might be implemented by only one country, or bloc of countries (or region or sector). The fear of any one country or bloc is that they would only raise their own cost of production, make themselves less competitive, and lose business to firms in other countries that may increase production and emissions. When only one country limits their emissions, any positive effect on emissions elsewhere is called “leakage”.

In efforts to “abate” or to reduce GHG emissions, the fear of lost business has pretty much deterred any attempt at unilateral climate policy. That positive leakage might be called a “terms of trade effect” (TTE), because unilateral policy raises the price of exports and reduces the price of imports. But our recent research paper points out a major effect that could offset part of that positive leakage. The “negative leakage” term in the equation might be called an “abatement resource effect” (ARE). That is, one additional thing happening is that the domestic firms face higher costs of their emissions, and so they want to substitute away from GHG emissions and instead use other resources for abatement – such as windmills, solar cells, energy efficient machinery, hybrids, electric cars, and even “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS). Thus they have at least SOME incentive to draw resources AWAY from other sectors or other countries. If that effect is large, the result might shrink those other sectors’ operations overall, and thus possibly SHRINK emissions elsewhere.

I don’t mean to oversell this idea, because it probably does not completely offset the usual positive “terms of trade effect”. But in some circumstances it COULD be large, and it COULD result in net negative leakage. The best example is probably to think about a tax or permit price for carbon emissions only in the electricity generating sector, within one country. For simplicity, suppose there’s no trade with any other countries, so the only choice for consumers in this country is how much to spend on “electricity” and how much to spend on “all other goods”. Demand for electricity is usually thought to be inelastic, which means consumers buy almost the same amount even as the price rises. If firms need to produce almost as much electricity, while substantially reducing their GHG emissions, they must invest a lot of labor AND capital into windmills, solar panels, and CCS. With any given total number of workers and investment dollars in the economy, then fewer resources are used to produce “all other goods”.

The ability of consumers to substitute between the two goods (electricity vs “all other”) is called the “elasticity of substitution in utility.” The ability of firms to substitute between GHG emissions and those OTHER inputs is called the “elasticity of substitution in production”. If the former is bigger than the latter, then net leakage is positive. If the latter is bigger than the former, then net leakage can be negative.

Okay, too technical. But the point is that other researchers have missed this “abatement resource effect” and overstated the likely positive effect on leakage. And that omission has led to overstated fears about the bad effects of unilateral carbon policy. What we show is that those fears are overstated, in some cases, where leakage may not be that bad. With some concentration on those favorable cases, one country might be able to undertake some good for the world without fear that they just lose business to other sectors.

Many advocates of small government have many ideas for how to move activities out of the public sector and into the private sector. Social Security can be privatized, using fully-funded private retirement investment accounts. Education can be privatized, with vouchers that can be used by parents to choose the best private school or charter school. All could save money for the federal budget, by taking advantage of the more efficient operations of the private sector.

In this blog, I’ll describe my new idea for privatization. Why not privatize the military! Many rich Republicans want more military spending, and I can imagine that they might well be willing to pay for it. Why not let them? Now, they are probably not willing to simply donate money to the federal government, with no recognition, nor any private return on their investment. But, we could provide the same kind of naming rights as many private operations: FedEx Field is the home of the Washington Redskins, because FedEx paid for the naming rights and they get PR advantages of doing so. The name of the business school at the University of Texas is the “McCombs School of business”, because Red McCombs paid for the naming rights, and he gets PR advantages of doing so. The J. Paul Getty Museum is the name of a major art museum in Los Angeles, presumably because somebody in the Getty family or foundation paid for the naming rights and gets PR advantages of doing so.

So, the idea is to write the name of any major donor on any piece of military equipment for which that donor covers at least half the cost. Pay for half a tank, and it will be the “Your Name Here” Army Battle Tank, with the name engraved on the equipment. You can even visit it, at certain times of year under certain conditions, and have your picture taken with it. If you are willing to pay a little more, half the cost of a cruise missile, you can have your name on that instead.

Now I’m not suggesting that the donor ought to be allowed to decide when to push the button. Nor even make any decisions at all. The payment is just to help out the U.S. Federal Budget deficit, with recognition for doing so. I’d bet that a good number of millionaires would really be willing to pay, for that kind of prestige. It might even be greater recognition if the missile were actually used! The well-heeled U.S. businessman might even get more U.S. business activity, after the newspaper announces that the “Your Name Here” cruise missile was launched at Tehran, killing 137 innocent civilians, but successfully deterring the Iranian government from pursuing a nuclear weapon that might kill even more.

Politicians like to say they want the U.S. to produce at least as much energy as it consumes – “energy independence”. And they certainly want to reassure consumers that they are doing something about the high price of gasoline. But the two goals are inconsistent. You can’t have both. Indeed, the current high price of oil is exactly what is now REDUCING our dependence on foreign oil!

We all know the price of gasoline has been increasing lately, now well over $4 per gallon in some locations. Five-dollar gas is predicted by Summer. In addition, the New York Times just reported that our dependence on foreign oil is falling. “In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.” The article points out that this strong new trend is based BOTH on the increase of U.S. production of oil AND on the decreased U.S. consumption of it. And both of those factors are based on the recent increases in oil and gasoline prices. Those higher prices are enough to induce producers to revisit old oil wells and to use new more-expensive technology to extract more oil from those same wells. The higher prices also are enough to induce consumers to conserve. Purchases of large cars and SUVs are down. Many people are driving less, even in their existing cars. A different article on the same day’s New York Times, on the same front page, also reports that “many young consumers today just do not care that much about cars.”

Decreased dependence on foreign oil does sound like good news. Actually, it is good for a number of reasons. (1) It is good for business in oil-producing states, helping raise them out of the current economic slow-growth period. (2) It is good for national energy security, not to have to depend on unstable governments around the rest of the world. (3) It reduces the overall U.S. trade deficit, of which the net import of oil was a big component. And (4) the reduced consumption of gasoline is good for the environment.

On the other hand, the increased U.S. production of oil is not good for the environment, as discussed in the same newspaper article just mentioned. As an aside, I would prefer to do more to decrease U.S. consumption of oil – not only from increased fuel efficiency but also by the use of alternative non-fossil fuels – and perhaps less from increased U.S. production of oil from dirty sources such as shale or tar sands. But that’s not the point for the moment.

The point for the moment is just that maybe the higher price of gasoline is a GOOD thing! We can’t take even small steps toward decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil UNLESS oil and gas prices rise. Any politician who tells you otherwise is pandering for your vote. It is the high price of oil that is both increasing U.S. production and decreasing U.S. Consumption.

Academic research is inherently a “public good”, which means that once a professor does all the research work and writes the paper, the social marginal cost of another reader is ZERO! If the research is useful, then it could be useful to additional readers at no extra cost whatsoever. Any charge for reading it would discourage those who could benefit while imposing no social cost whatever. Thus, the optimal price to charge per reader is zero.

But that’s not what journals charge. Non-profit associations might charge very little to subscribe to their journals, basically enough to cover their printing cost and mailing cost. Now, however, any research paper can be provided even more cheaply on a website. One useful purpose of an academic journal, still, is for the editor and reviewers to pass judgment on whether the research is good enough to be published, and to make further suggestions for improvement before publication. So, each paper to be published has some cost to review it and some cost to post it on the web. Even then, the social marginal cost of one additional person to read it is still zero!

How can a non-profit journal cover the cost of editing and reviewing the paper, and still provide free access? Just as for many kinds of “public good”, the nonprofit organization might need donations!

Even worse is the still-huge number of academic journals that are published not by a non-profit research association or by a university press, but by a private for-profit company. Those private publishers own the copyrights, and so they can charge a high enough price to make money, above and beyond their costs. And even worse than most private for-profit publishers is Elsevier.

Elsevier had a good idea, years ago, when they founded a large number of field journals in economics and in other disciplines. Elsevier now owns about 90% of the private for-profit academic journals, a virtual monopoly, so they charge huge prices and make huge profits. Those journals have become prestigious, and so authors want to publish in them. In order to “get in good” with the editors, those potential authors are willing to review other submitted papers for free. Elsevier uses all this free help from university professors who are reviewers, to improve the quality of the product that they sell, in order to make even higher profits.

I don’t blame Elsevier, a private company, for trying to make money. They have done a good job of it. But as university professors, we do NOT need to provide free help to them! I highly recommend reading a paper by Ted Bergstrom called “Free Labor for Costly Journals” in which he points out that we academic researchers at non-profit or state-run universities are helping private publishers make profits. I would also recommend a new blog by Prof. Jacob Vigdor of Duke University.

Mathematicians are forming a boycott of Elsevier. For another example, the nonprofit “Association of Environmental and Resource Economists” (AERE) are discussing whether to break away from Elsevier and start a new non-profit journal (read about all the difficulties in an article starting on page 23 of the AERE Newsletter). Finally, Ted Bergstrom has lots of info on his website.

We are stuck in a “bad equilibrium.” University researchers want to publish in the prestigious journals, which are often journals of private publishers like Elsevier. So those researchers review for free, for Elsevier, and they want their university to subscribe to those good journals of Elsevier. And profits are made, by Elsevier. We’d all be better off if we could “leap” to the “good equilibrium” where only non-profit associations and universities publish academic journals, at cost. Then when we review papers for free for those journals, and when the universities subscribe to those journals, we are all contributing to a public purpose, the provision of a public good.